Anyone reading my ten years of comments (remember Marie Burns, anyone?) knows I am a fact-based dialectician, with bits of Marxist philosophy (not the ideology!) combined with the I Ching (still the most complete appraisal of human options and conditions) who believes the founding political economy of race, enslavement, and wealth in America embedded an asymmetric tension between freedom and liberty (one singular/one collective).
It established denial as an American tool. Denial is a dynamic constant in America’s social and power narratives.
For conservatives, denial is masked in logic flaws and missing details. For liberals, denial is embedded in thinking in fixed blocks. In Michigan, Hillary had the numbers, but didn’t get the footsteps.
Evidence leads me not to a renaissance, but to things falling apart. A young deaf Publix punched in the back by a customer for ignoring a request as she was stocking. Trump’s plaque on the 15th hole of his VA golf course commemorating civil war deaths than records, locals, and experts say never occurred. Today, a Gaza amputee in a wheel chair shot to death [https://twitter.com/LawyerRogelio/status/996066107424411651]. I see Cassandra (snakes licked her ears!) and Pandora’s pluriverse, a multi-functioned/layered space and time of wealth and waste, hate and greed; governance and enterprises profligate and corrupt. A black employment rate whose gap in wages and numbers has not closed in 50 years, the silent cost of racism denied.
My comments follow 3 themes: presenting missed details (on Stephens, Brooks, Douthat), best plans and problems (Krugman), outside the box (Collins) and race in the larger American context (Blow).
My ideas don’t come pre-set–instead I search to recall the best details (here, the reference to Marie). I use a one level google search to find trends: the global middle class doubling by 2025 to 600 million; Brasil’s Bolsa Familia, using education to move millions out of poverty (students have to earn good grades witt health check-ups for families to receive cash assistance, which results in breaking the poverty cycle), or WVa’s Chemical Alliance Zone, an amazing cluster of chemical and polymer manufacturing exporting a billion a year.
I write about race without guilt or blame; traditionally blacks have also been America’s canaries, new trends hit blacks first! This trend of reporting people living their own lives, populist fascism, will expand–as lynching is the antecedent for mass shootings, discrimination for the way modern workers are treated (commented above); denial the source of intimidating and suppressing women–the arguments of justification run parallel.
I love finding overlooked details that reflect the whole. I love taking the whole apart into details. Finally, I love finding commonalities between differences, essences in global trends or domestic events. The media says Trump inspired anger–I say comfort in anger!
[http://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/opinion/the-american-renaissance-is-already-happening.html?comments#permid=27093469] Times Pick.
Walter Rhett And His Daughter, Damali Rhett, At The Opening Of The National Museum of African-American History And Culture.
Black History 360* 
Thank you for sharing your underlying philosophy of life, research goals and strategies, insights, and judgements. You help make sense of these chaotic and troubling times. Perhaps, most of all, I admire your dedication to truth and its pursuit.
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